The year 2020 was the most successful in the history of eCommerce. The pandemic has boosted it on several fronts at once.
Why has ECommerce Become so Popular?
Massive digitalization, a year of social isolation, and the continued explosion of social media have impacted the eCommerce industry as catalysts: consumers have turned to online shopping to buy things they can’t get in temporarily closed stores. ECommerce revenue for 2020 exceeded $4.13 trillion worldwide, according to 99Firms statistics. Those numbers only continue to grow in 2021. This means that online commerce is gaining momentum, and our review of the best tools for eCommerce will be relevant.
Development Factors
There are several factors for the rapid development of eCommerce in the near future.
Low Entry Threshold to Marketplaces for Small Businesses
Even companies that hadn’t had a website until 2020, suddenly went online. But eCommerce newcomers often don’t have enough experience and infrastructure to handle the increase in traffic and demands on marketplaces. Various tools help them cope with these challenges.
A Full-fledged IT Team to Create an Online Store is no Longer Needed
With the advent of a huge number of online tools to quickly create a landing page with checkout capabilities, it’s enough to spend a few hours designing a small online store.
Social Media Users Want to Buy Here and Now
ECommerce players are introducing tools for quick purchases right in news feeds or during watching the videos. The consumer no longer needs to go to an online store or marketplace. All they have to do is click on the item they like in the video.
8 Must-Have Ecommerce Tools for Rapid Retail Growth
Webfx
Loop Ventures predicts that by 2025, 75% of U.S. households will own smart speakers. More and more consumers will use voice search to shop online, order food, and organize their lives.
Voice assistants (Amazon Echo, Alexa, Alice, Google Home), thanks to their upgradable functionality, are becoming personal shopping assistants: from finding a product in online stores to buying it with voice control. They also remind the user of pending purchases or offer subscriptions.
Platforms like Webfx provide voice search optimization services, which are relatively popular. Nearly a third of Internet users already use voice search to make purchases. Voice shopping is projected to grow to $40 billion by 2022.
Integration with Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a service that helps you track eCommerce. It allows you to get useful information about your customers: where they came from, their interaction with products, etc.
With this service, you will be able to track abandoned shopping carts, identifying groups of shoppers who have changed their minds about making a purchase for whatever reason.
Working with Google Analytics reveals the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and helps optimize your online store for conversions and sales.
AWeber
AWeber is a very useful service because it really focuses on being the premier choice for email marketing in the current market. Designed specifically for entrepreneurs and small businesses, AWeber transforms the marketing experience and constantly updates information to ensure it remains competitive in this cluttered market.
Although AWeber originally entered the email marketing race in 1998, it is not yet obsolete. The company is constantly working to provide users with the next best thing to improve email deliverability and performance.
Tidio
Online retailers no longer need salespeople, but customers still crave personalized, “live” relationships. In this context, live chats are a good way to build customer feedback.
Chatbots were one of the first tools to take the conversational marketing world by storm. Chatbots have their limitations like they don’t allow as much warm communication and feel to customers like phone calls by agents do. But in many ways, chatbots have been a real boon to both businesses and customers.
They can be used to create one-on-one conversations, personalize the experience on the spot, and (with the right programming) they can bring much of your brand personality to a marketing conversation.
In addition, chatbots are cost-effective, much faster than email exchanges, and much more convenient than waiting on the phone.
Thus, today, there are a lot of interesting developments in this direction. For example, the Tidio service allows you to chat with the client directly in the browser.
Prisync
Prisync is a price tracking and dynamic pricing app that helps online sellers and brands to set profitable prices over their competitors. Prisync users can track their competitors’ prices and implement a pricing strategy to the changes in the industry. The Smart Pricing feature enables e-commerce businesses to have complete control and be sure they are in sync with the market. Beating a competitor’s prices is no longer hard work for them through Prisync’s alerts, frequent notifications and daily reports.
When you use Prisync, you’re guaranteed to have your customer support ready to provide a reply to any question.
Smile.io
This service will help you return customers and increase repeat sales.
Use the service if you want to stand out from the competition. Smile.io allows you to create a personal account in the style of your brand.
The program will analyze the behavior of your customers and offer them really interesting promotions.
Instapage
Instapage is an advanced landing page platform. It has a lot of advantages, making it a great choice for your business.
Most landing page builders offer the basics: landing page templates and some decent design tools. However, Instapage goes even further, offering a wonderful set of features designed not only to create landing pages but also to convert them.
When you use Instapage as part of your marketing tools, you get more than just an immersive designer and landing page editor, you also get in-depth Google analytics, access to split testing, and intuitive customizable templates.
Checkout on Instagram
According to recent data, there are more than 4.2 billion active social media users worldwide, making social media the perfect place to find new customers. Instagram recently introduced “Checkout on Instagram,” a feature that allows people to buy items without even leaving the app.
Analysts believe that more features like this will soon appear, making it easier to sell products and services to a large audience directly on users’ favorite apps.
Buffer
Nowadays, social networks are great assistants in increasing sales. They help enhance brand awareness and customer loyalty. Thus, the development of brand accounts in social networks is becoming more and more important for businesses.
Continuing with commerce on social networks, we present the leading platform for managing your profiles.
Buffer is the easiest and simplest way to schedule posts, track the popularity of your content, and manage all your accounts from one interface. Although Buffer is relatively new on the market, it has already beaten out some strong competitors and now has 4 million users worldwide.
Buffer has a good quality minimalist interface that is very easy to work with. Some people might think it lacks functionality compared to more established apps like Hootsuite, but, at the same time, it’s much cheaper, easy to learn, and has all the basic features for effective social media management.
Buffer also benefits from one unique addition, Pablo, with the help of which you can create visually beautiful diagrams. Then, you can simply share them on social media.
Keep in mind that you won’t find advice on what content is better to publish on the Buffer platform, so newcomers to marketing will have to learn the theory elsewhere.
ReadyCloud Suite
ReadyCloud Suite is a newer eCommerce tool that connects many of your operations under one hood. A robust eCommerce CRM, ReadyCloud creates instant customer profiles based on eCommerce order activity. This gives you insights into customer habits, behaviors, trends, and more, complete with analytics and metrics, shipping and returns timeline, and more.
ReadyCloud also comes with a multicarrier shipping plugin called ReadyShipper X; a cross-channel returns system called ReadyReturns, and an internal growth marketing tool called Action Alerts — which lets you send behavior-based text and email campaigns to new and existing customers.
ReadyCloud is team-ready and allows you to connect all aspects of your business, from shipping clerk to admin — coast to coast in as little as a login.
Conclusion
Experts say that 2020 and 2021 are the best years to enter the eCommerce market. But it is also important for those who already have an online store to keep their hand on the technological pulse: to use the tools that make the players competitive and help them develop. We hope you find good solutions for your business in this review because each of the platforms presented is a great tool for eCommerce and rapid retail growth.
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